50 Stories for 50 Years | Post 24
In my earlier posts, I’ve written about some of the coaches and instructors I had at USNA. Let me round that out with a few more of the professors I remember, the civilian ones, the military ones, the ones who noticed there were women in the room and treated us with respect.
I’ve blocked out every calculus and electrical instructor I ever had. Mercy, probably. More about me and my lack thereof than those instructors.
Lt Deafenbaugh was one of the good ones early. In my Youngster year, when I took the Seamanship and Navigation class, he spent an entire period arguing for the presence of women at the Academy, saying his own experience would have been better with us there, and couldn’t understand how anyone could see it any other way. I felt so appreciated by an officer who vocally championed our presence. It was a rarity.
Prof Yarbo, the French department chair, was another champion. As I was moving into my senior year, I’d maxed out my French courses and couldn’t study at the French Naval Academy because it didn’t admit women. So he built me a summer program at the University of Grenoble instead, and finished my last course as a personal study with him, in his office, just one other midshipman and me. Incroyable. A kind and gentle man, we talked about Les Misérables in French as if it were the easiest thing in the world.
Then there was Major Vetter, USMC, who taught the best economics class I ever took. He opened every session asking what was happening in the halls, what was going on in Bancroft, and I paid more attention in that class than in any other. I wrote an unprompted letter to the Academic Dean about him, about how obviously he cared about how our lives were going, not just how we tested. I found out at the end of that year he’d been named Instructor of the Year, so it wasn’t just me who noticed. Years later, he came back as Col Vetter, assistant academic dean, and I’d run into him around the Yard, he’d still ask how life was going. Still wanted the update.
Not everyone was gentle about it. Prof. Rachwald, Polish-born poli-sci, had survived by escaping the Soviet invasion, and his hatred of the Russians came out regularly in class, without apology. Damn those Russians!
And Prof Smedley taught chemistry with a flair for theater; he could throw a dusted eraser with pinpoint accuracy at a sleeping midshipman in the back row, and his demonstrations were the stuff of legend. When I moved back to Annapolis, he and Col Vetter were the two men I sought out. He was retired by then, living with his daughter, but he still made time to sit and listen to my son’s science fair project, asking questions and giving feedback, still the curious, interested professor he’d always been. Like he had nowhere else to be.
None of these men set out to be remembered fifty years later. They just paid attention, in ordinary ways, at a moment when that wasn’t a given. That’s usually how it works: the people who shape us rarely know they’re doing it. Next week’s post is about the other kind: the ones who, without meaning to, also taught me something about who I didn’t want to become.